Sunday, February 05, 2006

The Sunday Papers & the Cartoons

This newspaper has no wish to publish the Danish cartoons many Muslims find so offensive. In common with almost all British national newspapers, The Independent on Sunday recognises that re-publication would be regarded as a deliberate insult... We would no more have published original cartoons equating Islam with terrorism than we would have published ones depicting Jews as hook-nosed caricatures. Yet this last is precisely what the British newspaper The Muslim Weekly did last week. We reproduce its cartoon on our front page today only to report on what appears to be a double standard.

This newspaper would not have published the cartoons of Mohammed at the centre of this controversy, images which we regard as vulgar and fatuously insulting. But - and this is the crucial point - we reserve absolutely our right to make our own decision, free of threat and intimidation.

Prove it by publishing the cartoons, then. I can’t argue with these points though:

In this wretched affair, no sight has been more wretched than that of Jack Straw last week kowtowing to militant Islam… Where, also, was Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, as Islamic militants called for bloodshed?

It is telling that the reaction of protesters and politicians alike in much of the Islamic world has been to hold governments responsible for editorial decisions taken in media outlets. The assumption seems to be that the idea of a free press is an elegant sham, that democracies, just like dictatorships, involve controlled news, so nothing sees the black of print without an element of official sanction.

… or the sanction of Islam.

In Britain, the idea of a free press is indeed an elegant sham. It died this week.

(See the cartoons here or on over a hundred different websites via Michelle Malkin's blogburst.)

The Independent on Sunday's tortuous reasoning is really quite amusing.

'We would no more have published original cartoons equating Islam with terrorism than we would have published ones depicting Jews as hook-nosed caricatures.

[Huh? But they did publish the Jewish cartoon.]

'Yet this last is precisely what the British newspaper The Muslim Weekly did last week. We reproduce its cartoon on our front page today.

'...most Jews, we trust, will welcome our re-publication of the cartoon because it exposes anti-Semitism, an unfortunate tendency among some Muslims.'

Translation:

'We won't publish the Danish cartoons because they are an insult to Muslims and they will kill us for doing so.'

'We will publish anti-Semitic cartoon because it is an insult to Jews but they won't kill us for doing so. Actually, they will thank us.'

I also like the Indy's quaint description of the 'unfortunate tendency' of some Muslims to be anti-Semitic. Yeah, like they would refer to racism being an 'unfortunate tendency' of some BNP supporters.

It seems that if a person is a violent bigot but his violence and bigotry are informed by his devotion to Allah, it is 'unfortunate'.

However, if the violent bigot is told that he is a violent bigot because of his devotion to Allah, that is insulting and will only make him more bigoted and more violent.